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When moving to a hybrid cloud strategy, the number one concern that initially worries many leaders is the question of security: “Is my data really secure in a public cloud?”  While security is still top-of-mind these days, there are new concerns that are beginning to surface as well.   Namely, how difficult and how disruptive will it be to actually deploy a hybrid cloud strategy?  In fact, integration and interoperability are steadily edging out security as the customer’s primary pain points and decision-making factors. [1]

Turning our attention to the most likely use cases in 2018, infrastructure workloads are positioned to be the most highly-adopted workloads in hybrid cloud, according to a recent survey by Technology Business Research. The top infrastructure (IaaS) use cases for the cloud according to respondents are backup, disaster recovery and archiving. Why?  Because we believe cloud-based solutions are seen to be cost-effective alternatives to traditional, on-premises data protection services. IBM Spectrum Virtualize software is designed to help clients extend their current technology to hybrid clouds while controlling new investment, as well as solve the integration and interoperability concerns.

IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud, first supported on IBM Cloud infrastructure, can help clients implement common data services capabilities between on premises and the public cloud. The primary use case is disaster recovery, but this same software can also be used as part of a workload migration solution (either temporary or permanent). IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud provides disaster recovery, data replication and migration between local storage and the IBM Cloud, and also between IBM Cloud data centers. Enterprise leaders can take advantage of this capability to deploy a hybrid cloud architecture and enjoy a common set of services and features across storage resources.  In this way, IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud provides clients with a way to extend their current investments.

Data stored on IBM Storwize family systems, FlashSystem V9000, SAN Volume Controller, or VersaStack with any of over 400 IBM and non-IBM block storage systems can be mirrored to a cloud data center. Depending on recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives (RPO/RTO), networking budget and workload characteristics, IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud can address a variety of client needs.

Flexibility and interoperability

When considering the public cloud for a hybrid disaster recovery (DR) solution, client requirements and workloads can vary greatly. A “one size fits all” approach might work well for smaller deployments and those clients without significant recovery objectives, scalability or performance expectations.  But the beauty of the cloud is that there is a wide range of performance and capacity points that can be provisioned for use month to month, and without upfront commitments.  So as clients may require more or less capacity, or more or less performance over time, that flexibility is built into the IaaS experience.

IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud is engineered to work with IBM Cloud block storage, and that underlying storage can be changed or added to as needed.  To meet local requirements, it is supported in over 25 IBM Cloud data centers worldwide. Once installed and configured, IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud delivers a data services and management layer in the cloud that behaves just like on-premises storage, and the two environments can serve applications either on premises or in the cloud.  In this way, you extend your current IT while transitioning into a new cloud environment.

Many enterprise customers today have virtualized environments, applications running within a hypervisor and applications that are tuned for performance to run on bare metal servers. By using IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud, the mix of virtualized and bare-metal applications is not an issue because it can provide a serverless, storage-based replication solution for both environments.

As we continue to evolve IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud, clients will see a growing number of use cases that will help them in their journey, transitioning from on-premises IT data centers to reap the benefits and flexibility of a hybrid cloud world. To find out more, visit the webpage.

[1] Hybrid Cloud Customer Research 1H17 | Cloud Business Quarterly, 2017 Technology Business Research, Inc., https://pages.e2ma.net/pages/1780828/4470

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